Recently I talked about Live Android 0.2 and how to make a live USB for that. I thought to make a separate post to explain how to create live USBs considering its usefulness. UNetbootin is an extremely useful portable application which lets you create bootable live USBs from ISOs. By using this application, you can simply boot from USB rather than mounting the image on CDs or DVDs and booting from them. UNetbootin is available for both Windows and Linux. However, the windows version is said to work better.
Creating Live USB:
- Run UNetbootin.
- Select the distribution from any source like Floppy/Harddisk Image (the ISO file).
- Select target like USB.
- Reboot.
- Done.
Detail on complicated installations like frugal installations on harddrive and local machines can be read here.
UNetbootin supports huge list of distributions and also allows you to add more to it. A list of UNetbootin supported distributions is given below:
- Ubuntu (and official derivatives)
- 6.06 LTS
- 6.10
- 7.04
- 7.10
- 8.04 LTS
- 8.10
- 9.04
- Daily CD Images
- Debian
- Stable/Etch
- Testing/Lenny
- Unstable/Sid
- Linux Mint
- 3.1
- 4.0
- 5-r1
- 6
- openSUSE
- 10.2
- 10.3
- 11.0
- 11.1
- Factory
- Arch Linux
- 2007.08
- Damn Small Linux
- 4.4
- SliTaz
- Stable
- Cooking
- Puppy Linux
- 4.00
- gNewSense
- deltah-2.1
- FreeBSD
- 6.3
- 7.0
- NetBSD
- 4.0
- Fedora
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- Rawhide
- PCLinuxOS
- 2007
- 2008
- Sabayon Linux
- 4-LiteMCE
- Gentoo
- 2007.0
- 2008.0
- MEPIS
- SimplyMEPIS 8
- AntiX 8
- Zenwalk
- 5.2
- Slax
- 6
- Dreamlinux
- 3.2
- Elive
- Development
- CentOS
- 4
- 5
- Mandriva
- 2007.1
- 2008.0
- 2008.1
- FaunOS
- 0.5.4
- Frugalware Linux
- Stable
- Testing
- Current
- xPUD
- 0.8.9
- Foresight Linux
- 1.4.2
- VectorLinux
- 5.9
- Slackware
- 12.0
UNetbootin can also be used to load various system utilities, including:
- Parted Magic, a partition manager that can resize, repair, backup, and restore partitions.
- SystemRescueCD, a system repair, backup and recovery tool.
- Super Grub Disk, a boot utility that can restore and repair overwritten and misconfigured GRUB installs or directly boot various operating systems
- Dr.Web Antivirus, F-Secure Rescue CD, and Kaspersky Rescue Disk, which remove malware from Windows installs.
- Backtrack, a utility used for network analysis and penetration testing.
- Ophcrack, a utility which can recover Windows passwords.
- NTPasswd, a utility which can reset Windows passwords and edit the registry.
- Gujin, a graphical bootloader that can also be used to boot various operating systems and media.
- Smart Boot Manager (SBM), which can boot off CD-ROM and floppy drives on computers with a faulty BIOS.
- FreeDOS, which can run BIOS flash and other legacy DOS utilities.